Transformation is risky for your customer experience

Web, call centre, chat, social media, text…Customers are requiring you to provide more and more ways of interacting with your organisation.

They want you to know their precise needs and expect a seamless transition as they flip between communications channels. Given the highly competitive nature of today’s markets, your customers are in a strong position to make these demands.

But they aren’t the only ones driving innovation in the market. Managers of contact centre operations also face a barrage of new vendors, innovations and technologies promising to solve all their problems.

How can you meet these ever-increasing demands, ensure superior customer and agent experience and cut costs?

Using rather than building

In the face of ‘shiny new thing’ syndrome and with little previous experience with the new technologies and software you’re trying to introduce, the only way to learn what works is by making painful—and often disruptive—mistakes. Introducing one new piece of technology can also impact other aspects of your contact centre. And anything that disrupts your contact centre often costs you money. With lots of stakeholders involved – customers, agents, supervisors, business owners, IT teams and digital teams - it’s easy to lose focus on what the business issue is.

AI is a great example of a technology that can be ahead of the business application. In reality, AI depends on a database of information and can take as long to fully train as a person. But when you put in the effort, it can be very successful. A guided help application that used AI to advise agents on the best possible response while dealing with customers was reported by agents as “the best software we have ever had in the Contact Centre.”

Starting with the business problem

Our experience is that if you focus on using contact centre technology, you can spend your time defining the best experience to provide your customers, identifying new revenue streams, and using your contact centre to deliver on these goals.

By starting with what the business problem is that you need to solve, engaging with the right group of stakeholders and understanding your customers, it’s possible to map out the customer journey you want and then choose the right mix of technology to improve the customer experience and reduce costs.

For example, working through the customer journey helps you consider the right mix of self-service or automation (which is economical but efficient) and human intervention (expensive but highly valued by customers).

It also helps you understand the mindset of your customers and what technology they would be willing to interact with, if your flight is delayed, you don’t want video based chat, you want a quick and easy text based solution. Equally, understanding that people want their customer experience to be secure but don’t like giving personal details out to agents can lead to using voice identification. It’s easier for customers, whilst meeting their needs to be secure, but it also removes 45 seconds from a call time. 

Transforming your customer experience

Whether you want to move from the data centre into the cloud, add new contact channels, or adopt advanced technologies such as AI, we’ve worked with more than 200 global organisations, so we know the pitfalls to avoid. You are able to deploy market-leading contact centre capabilities—and keep your operations running— to deliver the best service possible to your customers.

Find out how you can use the cloud to improve your customer experience.